TO OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTERS: CONGRESS (NOT BANKS OR WALL STREET!!!) Caused The Housing Collapse AND, Therefore, The Resulting Recession

THE MOMENT those sub-prime mortgages were signed/approved this recession was guaranteed. It doesn't matter who ended up holding that worthless paper. Yes, Wall Street created packages of these worthless investments AND the insurance policies intended to protect those investments but if they hadn't owned that stuff, someone else WOULD have and the housing market would still have collapsed, taking our economy with it.

So, the only rational argument is which of the following are most responsible for causing those mortgages being created in the first place:

1. The borrowers who actually couldn't afford the mortgage,
2. The banks who lent money to the borrowers, knowing they were risky or
3. Congress who cooked up this sub-prime mortgage scam in the first place and forced banks to approve them.

The common sense answer to the question, who caused the housing collapse and, therefore, our recession, is Congress, PERIOD. If they had never created the sub-prime mortgage program GEARED toward putting risky borrowers into homes, this problem would not have happened. That alone makes Congress most complicit in our economic collapse. However, they then made failure evven more of a guaranteed thing by forcing banks to make loans that banks KNEW were too risky. Here are the facts about that:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo125.html

Fannie, Freddie and various progressive congressmen told banks they were required to make the loans but not to worry because Fannie and Freddie would guarantee the loans. When the government tells you that you must do something or you'll have a big price to pay, what do YOU do?

So, progressives created and pushed the sub-prime mortgage program AND forced banks to loan to people who were unqualified under normal guidelines. How can a rational person say it was the banks' fault?

The last parties to consider as responsible are the borrowers. C'mon folks! When a person without the resources to buy a home is told he doesn't qualify BUT he can have one anyway, what do you expect him to do? Especially if he's a product of a failed education system and can't figure out how bad it is for him to have such a mortgage?

As for the claim that Republican opposition to regulation caused any part of this, that's even worse nonsense. It is progressive resulation that caused this! They're the ones who told Fannie and Freddie what they must do. (News flash: that IS regulation.) And two months before the collapse, it was the progressive (Barney Frank) in charge of regulating Fannie and Freddie who still(!) resisted regulating them because, he said, they were safe and stable and in no danger whatsoever(!) of defaulting. Republicans didn't resist regulating sub-prime mortgages. Progressives did, even when people with half a brain could see the train wreck coming.